Yamaha Revstar 502T review

The 502T was pretty much the original design that kick-started the Revstar range. 

With the same shape as the 320, it swaps to all-mahogany construction (with a thin 5mm maple cap), adds belly and ribcage contours, a crisply bound top edge, a subtly deeper profile neck with bound dot-inlaid fingerboard, bigger frets and matching binding. 

Most visually different, however, is the aluminium tailpiece, part of design theme that draws on a different part of Yamaha’s massive corporate output - the old-school cool of its Café Racer motorbikes. Placed behind a satin nickel tune-o-matic bridge, the tailpiece is height adjustable, and even works as a pretty stiff pitch-rising vibrato. Oh, and it looks pretty cool, right?

Well, that dark Bowden Green colour - named after the address of the original-concept design team in south London - might be a bit Marmite, but on stage (and in our photos) it looks virtually black. 

The 502T and its sibling, the 502 (without the tailpiece and with a hand-rubbed satin top and headface), both use Yamaha-designed soapbar P-90 single coils with a medium-hot output, and like all the models, have a simple three-way selector switch, master volume and tone. 

Pull up the tone control, however, and you voice that Dry Switch - basically a passive high-pass filter that thins out the sound a little. It adds surprising versatility to the biting-hot single-coil sound of the soapbars and easily kicks out a classic, punkier rock tonality or just-as-cool, old-school jazzy, bluesy soulful pop tones.